Building a company while finishing an engineering degree

I started E-Com Cabin in 2020, in the final years of an electrical engineering degree at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore. People assume you have to choose between the two, that one is a distraction from the other. You do not have to choose. But you do have to be honest about what it costs and what it teaches, because both are real.

Why I did not wait

The sensible advice is to finish school, get the job, and start the company later when it is safe. The trouble with later is that it rarely arrives, and the appetite for risk you have at twenty-two is not a resource that compounds. It spends down.

So I ran both at once. Lectures and labs by day, the business in every hour around them. It was not balanced and I will not pretend it was. But the company was real revenue and real clients while I was still a student, and that head start is the kind you cannot buy back later.

What the degree gave the business

Engineering does not teach you ecommerce. It teaches you a reflex, and the reflex turned out to be the whole point. When something breaks, an engineer does not ask how to patch the symptom. They ask what structure produced it, and they fix that.

My final-year project was an IoT system for faculty-room automation. Unglamorous, but it drilled in the lesson that has run through everything since: a system is only as good as the part that works when nobody is watching. That is true of a sensor on a wall and it is true of a fulfillment process at two in the morning.

A system is only as good as the part that works when nobody is watching.

What it cost

Here is the honest part, because the version where it is all hustle and triumph is a lie. You lose the ordinary student years. The late nights are not the fun kind. You disappoint people sometimes, on both sides, because you cannot be fully present in two places. There were stretches where the only thing holding it together was a checklist and stubbornness.

I would do it again. But I would not tell you it was free, and anyone who tells you their version was free is selling something.

For anyone in the middle of it

If you are building something while you study, you are not behind and you are not reckless. You are buying a head start at a steep but fair price. Be honest about the cost, lean on systems instead of stamina, and protect the few things that genuinely need you. The degree taught me to think in structures. The business taught me to live in one. I needed both.